Amy Campbell reports in GQ about Australia making Google and Facebook cooperate with (voluntarily) paying news outlets for content, and cites Open Markets Institute Executive Director Barry Lynn’s Op-Ed urging the US to apply such traditional antimonopoly rules to Google and Facebook.

In December 2019, on the advice of the digital platforms inquiry, the Australian government gave Google and Facebook an ultimatum: cooperate with the recommendations we’re about to issue, which will involve (voluntarily) paying Australian news outlets for the content you’ve always used for free, and we’ll all get along just fine.

Then came Covid-19. If banking on the altruism of tech giants seemed optimistic pre-pandemic, suddenly, the thought of Facebook and Google paying for news stories off their own bat (or giving media platforms a share of the advertising dollars generated by said stories) seemed highly unlikely.

I mean, would you suddenly start paying for a service that was lining your pockets, and that you’d grown accustomed to getting for free? I’d love to give you the benefit of the doubt, but given the current economic crisis, I’m going to wager most humans would not.   

This realisation must have dawned on the government, which had initially asked the ACCC to establish the voluntary codes in time for a November 2020 rollout. Because on Monday, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said to hell with the voluntary measures, announcing instead that the code would be ‘mandatory.’

Why the sudden change of heart?

Well, if Australian newspapers and media outlets were doing it tough before the coronavirus, they are holding on for dear life now. Just like any business or industry that was feeling a little fragile pre-pandemic – which the media was and has been since Google and Facebook began cutting its lunch – things have gotten desperate.

The big companies that usually spend thousands on placing advertisements in newspapers and online are withholding those thousands in their own bid to survive. And while subscription rates to a lot of papers and news outlets are reportedly up, without advertising cashola, the price of a conventional subscription alone isn’t enough to keep a publication afloat.

This is a roundabout way of saying: what was once a thorn in the traditional media’s spine is now a life-or-death situation (the tech titans are the thorns, FYI). So, in survival mode, publishers from The Australian to The Guardian have ramped up cries for the government to step in and create a more even playing field.

Their number one non-negotiable? Make (don't encourage) the Googles and Facebooks of the world to pay for the content they place on their news feeds and in their search pages, and which they – not the platforms where the content originated – receive advertising revenue from.

How was this allowed to happen in the first place?  

If this question is keeping you awake at night, I recommend reading this opinion piece, which was written by the director of the Open Markets Institute Barry Lynn and published in The Guardian.

This is a pretty big deal

Correct. Although many countries have tried to develop framework that encourages tech giants to abide by the same rules as traditional media (like, paying for content they do not own), this is the first time a country has made any such framework mandatory. As in, legally abiding.

According to Frydenberg, who seems to enjoy announcing this type of reform than he does the annual budget (“we won’t bow to their threats,” he triumphantly told the ABC on Monday), the new code will be binding and financial penalties will be issued if it’s not adhered to.

Last year, the European Union introduced new copyright rules that asked Google to negotiate with publishers directly about paying for the news content that appears on its search pages. (You know when you search something on Google and it brings up an expanded paragraph that answers your question sufficiently enough, so you don’t even need to click through to the source website? This is the content outlets want compensation for).   

The USA also passed a bill in 2019 that enabled ‘negotiation’ between news outlets and tech giants. It’s possible the Australian government noticed negotiation, especially in the age of coronavirus, probably wasn’t going to cut the mustard, deciding to take the unprecedented step of enforcing binding rules instead. 

Read the full article in GQ here.